Day: 2016-10-18

It has always fascinated me that people take so much issue with law enforcement using things like facial recognition tools, as well as tools that assist them search out keywords on social media and the like.

Tools that marketers have been using for years.

So yet on the other hand, we don’t seem to notice or care that virtually every online move one makes is being tracked and seen by someone, including our pictures.

Every time you swipe a credit card or bank card, you are being tracked, everything you purchase is being tracked, sites you visit, ad’s you may click on, types of clothing you look at, shoes, the list is virtually endless.

Someone or rather several someones are seeing what you are paying for, searching for and needing all of the time.

Whether you are online or not too.

That someone or those many someone’s seeing all of our stuff, well they are not law enforcement, some of those someone’s are able to get enough information about us that they can in turn sell it online to the highest bidder.

Marketers and social media, stores, etc have no major calls for oversight, seem to be hacked more than law enforcement and yet they track our every move, see all of our online spending, what porn sites you visit, every picture that you have, even the one’s with your naughty bits showing that you sent via email or text or have saved in your cloud storage and yes all of the cat pictures and videos are seen too.

What your grocery list looks like is seen, what music you listen to is noted, in fact, Spotify pays attention to my website and suggests music based off of what pieces I have written in the past and what music I have added to my website, the majority of the music I share on my website is through Youtube, and not Spotify.

If you visit a bank’s ATM often enough and it’s not your bank, you will actually start getting junk mail from the bank whose ATM you keep drawing money out of, asking you to switch banks.

Anyone go to Target or other box stores? Stores that you do not have a store credit card for and suddenly a month later you start getting all of this junk mail addressed specifically to you with ad’s that are geared towards what you have purchased in the past month at those box stores?

Do you remember giving them your mailing address? No, I bet you don’t but that bank card that you used, the one you swiped to pay for your goods with, well that gave them your address.

We are more willing to let strangers who have no restriction or oversight see everything we do and are into but when it comes to Law Enforcement, well they are SOL…

So here’s the deal, recently it was discovered that maybe roughly half of American adult images appear in the unregulated police databases (if one has a drivers license, passport or state issued ID, your image is already in a database).

So now everyone wants this DOJ investigation and blah, blah, blah…

“Face recognition technology has enormous civil liberties implications and its use must be closely examined to ensure that it is not violating Americans’ civil rights,” according to ACLU’s letter, that went on to say, “The safeguards to ensure this technology is being used fairly and responsibly appear to be virtually nonexistent.”

But I suppose that because it is the law enforcement that has it, they are totally abusing it and singling out individuals of color and only those individuals….they couldn’t possibly be using it to find and locate known criminals, known associates of known criminals or individuals who are missing and endangered, or a terrorist or suspected terrorist entering the country, running around the country or anything…they are cops after all right?

It’s truly sad when marketers, social media sites, banks, gas stations, big box stores, email providers, and criminals have more tools at their disposal about all of us than law enforcement.

And everyone but law enforcement is abusing it.

By the way, the American Civil Liberties Union and those 51 other advocacy groups who ran to the DOJ concerned over facial recognition and cried wolf, have absolutely no proof of any wrongdoing on the part of law enforcement.

While I agree with policing the police, we can’t keep cutting them off at the knee.

Its facial recognition…as seen in the movies and on TV folks, nothing more or less than that, it does not require a ton of oversight.

Besides, marketers are looking at facial recognition tools…it won’t be long before they are using it.